Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Only a few weeks after Page joined the Yardbirds came the debut performance of an act that would seismically shift the entire music scene. On 29 July 1966 Cream – which Clapton had formed with drummer Ginger Baker and bassist and vocalist Jack Bruce – performed their first ever stage show, at Manchester’s Twisted Wheel, a venue more accustomed to hosting pill-popping Mod all-nighters, itself an indicator of changing times. Within a year Cream would be touring the United States to enormous acclaim, and, in a new twist, long-haired and stoned American audiences would reverently sit cross-legged on ballroom floors as Clapton tore through epic, frequently self-indulgent, guitar solos.

      The day after the first Cream gig, on 30 July 1966, England won the football World Cup for the first time, on home soil, and national confidence surged. And by the end of the year another power trio, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, were ferociously tearing up and down the UK’s venues and charts, with their first hit ‘Hey Joe’ and sensational live performances.

      Following that Wembley NME date, the Rolling Stones were on something of a hiatus. Anita Pallenberg, Brian Jones’s girlfriend, had bought a flat at 1 Courtfield Road, behind Gloucester Road tube station, and the Rolling Stone had moved in with her. Like several women in this rarefied bohemian milieu, Anita had about her an intriguing high-priestess aspect; she was attracted to the occult and was rarely without a bag containing rolling papers, tarot cards and occasionally the odd bone. Christopher Gibbs, a fashionable Chelsea art and antiques dealer, had insisted to Anita that she must buy the property, which only had one room and a set of stairs leading to a minstrel’s gallery that formed a bedroom of sorts.

      Page had been friendly with the Rolling Stones, especially Brian Jones, since he first saw them at Ealing Jazz Club four years earlier. Now, in those first months with the Yardbirds, he was an occasional visitor to the Courtfield Road flat, along with Keith Richards and Tara Browne, the Guinness heir who would be dead by the end of the year, crashing his Lotus Elan after leaving the flat, his death celebrated in the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’. It was at 1 Courtfield Road that Jones and Pallenberg began to regularly ingest LSD, soon introducing Richards to its glimpses of another reality. It is unlikely that Page, who developed a fondness for psychedelic drugs and was no longer confined by the rigidity of session work’s time constraints, did not also enter this arcane coterie.

      Through Robert Fraser, a Mayfair art dealer and major player in the Swinging London scene, the trio of Jones, Pallenberg and Richards became friends with the revered independent filmmaker and occultist Kenneth Anger, a disciple of Aleister Crowley. Anger’s very beautiful short movies, marinaded in metaphysical matters, were like visual poems. Anger’s use of pop music to tell the story in his films would prove to be hugely influential. Martin Scorsese would replicate it in his breakthrough film Mean Streets, and Anger used Bobby Vinton’s ‘Blue Velvet’ in his 1963 movie Scorpio Rising, 23 years before David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet. Anger considered Pallenberg to be ‘a witch’ – in turn she claimed that everything she knew about witchcraft had been learned from the filmmaker – and Brian Jones too, and that ‘the occult unit within the Stones was Keith and Anita and Brian’. Keith had been turned on to such matters by Anita, and the pair would soon become lovers. A principal consequence of such out-on-the-edge thinking was the writing and recording of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, a song that – as Altamont would suggest – may not have been without its consequences. Page was yet to meet Kenneth Anger. But when he finally did, some years later, it began a relationship also not without penalties.

      At the beginning of August 1966 the Yardbirds went into IBC Studios to record a new single, with Simon Napier-Bell at the production helm. Although ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’, as the song was titled, came from the germ of an idea that Page and Keith Relf had come up with, the composing credits for the song would be attributed to all five group members. ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’ would be the most psychedelic of all the Yardbirds’ singles. Like a pointer to the future there were dual lead guitars on the record, Page and Jeff Beck, and so Page once more brought in his friend John Paul Jones to play bass. Beck, who had been suffering from ill health, added his own guitar parts later, along with a piece of spoken-word absurdism based on his experiences in a sexual health clinic. Aside from this whimsy, the lyrics themselves had considerable poignancy, relating to experiences of déjà vu or even of past-life existences – appropriately complex subject matter as the pop-based first half of the 1960s gave way to the rockier second half.

      ‘It was a compressed pop-art explosion, with a ferocious staccato guitar figure, a massive descending riff and rolling instrumental break and LSD-inspired lyrics that questioned the construction of reality and the nature of time,’ wrote Jon Savage in 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded. But by some it was seen as wilfully clever clogs. Penny Valentine, Disc and Music Echo’s reliable record reviewer, was extremely dismissive: ‘I have had enough of this sort of excuse for music. It is not clever, it is not entertaining, it is not informative. It is boring and pretentious. I am tired of people like the Yardbirds thinking this sort of thing is clever when people like the Spoonful and Beach Boys are putting real thought into their music. And if I hear the word psychedelic mentioned again I will go nuts.’

      In fact, in the UK ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’ only stuttered to the edge of the Top 30. As far as Britain was concerned, the Yardbirds were – in the jargon of the time – on their way out.

      On 5 August 1966 Page played bass with the Yardbirds in the eighth-floor Auditorium of Dayton’s Department Store in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a regular gig venue. Although he had visited the United States twice before, this was the very first American show that he ever performed. This, the Yardbirds’ third US tour, had been scheduled to kick off a week earlier, but Beck was bedridden with tonsillitis, which was why he had not been present at the initial ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’ session. At Dayton’s Department Store there were two concerts, one at 1 p.m., the other at 4. ‘The surroundings felt quite surreal,’ Page remarked on his website many years later. For the show he was clad in a purple jumpsuit.

      ‘Shapes of Things’ had been a US hit when it was released in February that year, reaching the number 11 slot; it was followed by ‘Over Under Sideways Down’, out in June and two months later still in the US charts, where it would peak at number 10, the group’s biggest-ever American hit. The Roger the Engineer album had been released in July in the USA as Over Under Sideways Down, and that esteemed LP would get to number 52, not bad for a group starting its career in the USA.

      The tour trundled through the Midwest – Chicago, Detroit, dates in Indiana – and down into Texas and assorted Bible Belt areas, playing the same sort of state fairs that had so irritated the Rolling Stones on their early US tours – unaware perhaps that these sort of shows were where Elvis Presley first honed his live act. Jeff Beck had not fully recovered from his illness, and would frequently take out his ire on the inadequate amplifiers at the venues. ‘If he didn’t get his sound right, he’d just kick the amps offstage,’ recalled drummer Jim McCarty.

      Not that the shows weren’t without a modicum of glamour. Due to a national airline strike, Simon Napier-Bell had been obliged to charter a small private plane. After Beck had smashed his own Marshall amp, he insisted that he would not carry on without an identical replacement. According to Napier-Bell, Page used the dilemma to undermine him: ‘“Simon is our manager,” he said, “so it is on him to find a replacement.” There were hardly any Marshall amps at all in the USA at that time – probably no more than 20 – so when I finally tracked one down we had to send the plane to pick it up, which cost an absolute fortune, far more than the amp cost. But that kept Jeff Beck happy, and allowed Jimmy Page to feel he’d got one over on me.’

      On 23 August 1966 the Yardbirds played Santa Catalina Island, a resort 22 miles from Los Angeles in the Pacific Ocean. The group arrived on a boat from Long Beach filled with competition winners from radio station KFWB, and one of these fans noticed that Beck seemed in a ‘difficult’ mood. СКАЧАТЬ